A/N: I hadn't expected this story to come to anything at all, I simply wrote it because I had a lot of angst to get out of me after watching 'Tick Tick Tick' for the billionth time, and during my extreme DHSAB period of obsession. I wrote it in under an hour and put it up without even reading through it once (so sorry for all the typos.) Quite pleasantly surprised that people read/reviewed it, and thanks a lot to all of you who did, as well as alert'd and favourited it!
November 2011
New York
Tonight was the night. They all knew it, and it hung over the group awkwardly, something they all wanted to pretend had never happened but impossible to ignore. Lily and Marshall were abnormally quiet, but Ted noticed that their hands were grasped tightly together, and not once had they moved from that position in the two hours that they had been at MacLaren's. Robin knocked back a glass of scotch, her fifth in that hour alone. Ted found himself reciting names of architects in his mind, long pieces of poetry in their original Latin form, anything to distract himself from the distinct lack of one person.
They hoped, ever so briefly. Even though each one of them claimed not to, swore with all their hearts and probably wished that they didn't. But every time the door to the bar opened, their eyes flashed to the door, heads rising, hopes rising but quickly crushed by unfamiliar, unimportant faces.
Exactly two years had gone by just like that. Ted wondered where Barney was now, what he was doing. Whether he was still the same old womanising Barney. When Barney had disappeared so suddenly, first to arrive was the panic. Then the dying embers of hope. Then the blame. And finally, the ways to cope.
Ted threw himself into work, and when that failed, he started hanging out at the bar more often. Whenever he saw a slutty girl, classified by Barney himself as girls between 18 and 25 at any bar wearing either a tank top, low cut jeans or sporting at least one tattoo (score if it's a tramp stamp), or a girl from any other country or state (the only exception being that she was hot, of course), he ended up talking to her, using every trick Barney had taught him as a sort of ode to him.
He hardly ever went back with them, though Barney's lessons proved surprisingly effective. He'd asked about charming and handsome blonds who had slept with them and never called them again, and he allowed himself to hope, ever so briefly, when he asked what his name was. Never was it Barney, or Lorenzo von Matterhorn, or Larney Stinson, or any of the fake names that Ted had known Barney to use.
Lily blamed herself for not noticing the signs, despite how much everyone in the group told her that it wasn't her fault. She distracted herself with her precious baby, whom she and Marshall decided to name Billy - the name Barney once said that he would have picked for himself had he not been named Barney.
Marshall considered going back to work at GNB just for the memories of Barney there. But he didn't. He took care of his son and thought of all the things that Barney would have tried to teach him. And whenever the salt he threw over his shoulder for good luck formed a shape, or something that looked like a sasquatch was spotted in New York, he took it as a sign that Barney would be back soon. But he never was.
And Robin. Robin dealt with it the worst. Her relationship with Kevin lasted two more weeks before she broke down and told him the truth. Kevin was surprisingly calm and the split was amicable, but Robin dealt with things the way she always did - keeping to herself and letting everything build up within her until she was about to burst. She spent entire nights shooting targets, drinking scotch and lighting cigars. She called up every laser tag place in New York to ask if a particularly talented blond of about 30 years old had been there recently. She found Guy, Barney's guy guy, but Barney hadn't been in contact with him either. And finally, she pretended to care a lot more about work and gave up on dating entirely.
After the sixth scotch, Ted insisted that he bring Robin back to the apartment before she passed out, but Robin refused. Silence hung over the group once more, when Lily finally broke it by saying the one thing that was everyone's minds.
"I miss Barney."
And they sat there, Lily and Marshall holding hands, Ted distracting himself and Robin drinking scotch, just waiting for the man they knew would never come.
Los Angeles
Actual-Barney liked the Billy that he had created, the Billy Smith that he now lived. He liked the simplicity of Billy's life, the uncomplicated everyday problems that were easily resolved, the cheeky hints to his old life that he included just for the laugh.
Like the blog. He had locked his old blog, awesome-Barney's blog, so well that the only people who could get through the system were The Company's people. Billy's blog however, he enjoyed. It was fun, playing Billy, playing Dr Horrible. A quirky name and a quirky identity, so different from his previous life, and Barney enjoyed it.
It had been more than a year before he realised why he always dressed up a little bit better before going to the Laundromat, why he stumbled constantly while washing his clothes there, why he seemed unable to talk. Penny, the girl whom he always thought was kinda cute had somehow wormed her way into his heart. Billy's heart. Or actual-Barney's heart, he wasn't sure.
Awesome-Barney gone, he couldn't even talk to her, let alone attempt a pick-up line. And he liked that, in a twisted way. The simple love of pining after the girl at the Laundromat.
He liked being Dr Horrible. Occasionally breaking away from Billy and pretending to be evil, like a kitten dressing up as a lion. Often, he watched his blog and laughed at it, because with his life being so simple, there was suddenly a lot more to laugh at.
He even liked being defeated, being triumphed at every attempt by Captain Hammer. He even liked getting beaten up, feeling in a twisted way that he somehow deserved it after all he had done to the girls as awesome-Barney.
All in all, he liked his new life.
And he most definitely did not miss four people in New York.
And if he ever did ponder about them occasionally, like every second of each day, it was only because they were probably useless without his awesome presence there. He refused to miss them, to feel lonely without them, to wonder whether Lily and Marshall had a child, whether Ted had married, and…. And wonder anything about her.
He most definitely never thought about her. Never had she visited him in his dreams, her scent, her crinkly laugh, every detail of her seeping into his subconscious every single night, until he woke up, feeling oddly empty, like there was a hole within him.
Which was why he had no idea why he woken up at 2am in the morning exactly two years after he had left awesome-Barney behind, got on the computer and did the one thing he could that he thought might fill the growing emptiness within him.
Book a ticket.
To New York.